Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew are among those named in court documents detailing connections of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Last month, US judge Loretta Preska ruled that documents that were part of Virginia Giuffre‘s 2015 defamation case against Ghislaine Maxwell should be made public.
The release comes after a deadline for objections passed on Monday January 1.
This expose confirms the identities of some 200 associates of the disgraced financier who, up until now, have only been known as John and Jane Doe in court papers.
Some of the names included in the documents are former US presidents Bill Clinton, Donald Trump – although neither is accused of illegality – and with Prince Andrew, Sky News reports.
Amongst the documents released was the testimony of a woman named Johanna Sjoberg, who has claimed that Prince Andrew groped her breast while sitting on a couch inside Epstein’s Manhattan apartment in 2001.
Buckingham Palace has said in a statement that the allegations are “categorically untrue”.
In her testimony, given in May 2016, Sjoberg claimed that on one occasion while flying to Manhattan with Epstein, Maxwell, Ms Giuffre and Prince Andrew, the financier’s jet was diverted to Atlantic City, New Jersey, after Epstein said they should go to one of Donald Trump’s casinos.
“The pilot’s told me to go back and tell [Epstein] that we can’t land in New York and that we were going to have to land in Atlantic City,” she said.
“Jeffrey said, Great, we’ll call up Trump and we’ll go to – I don’t recall the name of the casino, but – we’ll go to the casino.”
Later, when questioned on if she had to give Mr Trump a massage, Ms Sjoberg said she was never asked to.
In her interview, which was given under oath, Sjoberg also recalled conversation with Epstein in which he claimed former US president Bill Clinton “likes them young.”
ABC News has reported that Clinton is mentioned in more than 50 of the documents.
In a statement released in 2019, a spokesperson for the former president said he had “not spoken to Epstein in well over a decade” and “knows nothing about the terrible crimes” committed by him and Maxwell.
In other documents, Maxwell confirmed Clinton had travelled on board Epstein’s private jet, although she could not recall exactly how many times.
While ordering the release of the list, Judge Preska said many the unredacted names in the documents had already been identified by the media or during Maxwell’s trial, and that many others had not raised objections to the documents being released.
The documents do not appear to reveal any new major allegations against Epstein, according to the BBC, but more documents are set to be released in the coming days.
A year after Giuffre’s defamation case against Maxwell, US district court judge, Robert Sweet, rejected Maxwell’s motion to dismiss the case as he found the claims included a lot of context and facts “more broad than the allegedly defamatory statements”.
He concluded that Giuffre “was a victim of sustained underage sexual abuse between 1999 and 2002”.
From that came a series of lawsuits, including Giuffre’s action about Prince Andrew for “sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress”.
This was settled out of court.
Epstein was found dead in his cell at a federal jail in Manhattan in August 2019 while he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.
Maxwell, 62, is serving a 20-year prison sentence after she was convicted of helping Epstein recruit and sexually abuse underage girls.
Related links:
Prince Andrew’s return to public life condemned by Jeffrey Epstein victims
Ghislaine Maxwell claims infamous photo of Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre is fake
